Download royalty-free sounds from Sound Jay

Multimedia. The very term requires that more than one medium be involved. Pretty pictures? Not multimedia. Silent movie? Not multimedia. If you're going to do multimedia, often that means that you're going to include sound with your visual content. But unless you've got your own recording studio or a big library of sounds, you may be out of luck.

Sound Jay offers a bunch of royalty-free sounds that you are free to use on your website or in your project. You can pick from mechanical sounds like cars and tools, electronic sounds like phones and appliances, human sounds like footsteps, and even some music tracks. Most are available as WAV files or as MP3 downloads.

You're free to use the sounds however you like, provided you don't just sell them or claim them as your own. And it might be nice to credit the site for any that you do use.

Sound Jay is a free online service. You should be able to get there and download their sound files using any modern web browser.

Download Sound Jay

Tagoo Finds MP3s for You to Stream or Download

Since I posted 35 Places To Download Free, Legal MP3s, I now fully understand just how much everyone on the damn internet wants free music. Well, here's another place to feed your addiction.

I wandered over to Tagoo expecting to find another piece of hastily assembled Google search garbage. Man, was I in for a surprise.

Tagoo finds direct links to MP3 files, and it lets you stream them or build playlists right on their site.

It'll suggest while you type: "prote," offered me Protest The Hero. Well done, Tagoo! When results appear, click the play button immediately to the right of the track to listen to it immediately. The track's artist, title, genre, bitrate, filesize, and length are all displayed.

It's even nice enough to warn you about potentially slow download sites, marking them with a red dot.



Pausing on the button will give you other options: choose a mood for the track, open it in the player in a new window, visit the page hosting the file, or add the song to a playlist.



You'll have to sign up to build playlists, but registration takes all of 5 seconds and the playlist feature is ridiculously cool. Add tracks to different playlists, and then view your lists to stream them or download the M3U. I love this feature. I can build playlists at home and then fire them up on my pc at work, or on my laptop wherever I've got wireless.

When Tagoo displays your search results, it'll also show you user-created playlists that contain similar tracks. Take a listen, and then tell Tagoo if you liked it or not.

This is an awesome search tool, and a great place to find music. Here's hoping it says around for us to enjoy!

Free file format conversion tool

Formats, formats, formats…. We're awash in multimedia content: images, audio, video. Do you have the right tools to deal with all of the different file formats? In other words, if you download "X", can you look at it, listen to it, or play it? How about putting it on your iPod, iPhone, or PSP? Not necessarily—you may need to convert that file to a different format.

Format Factory is a free media converter that can convert just about anything into just about anything else. Along with file conversions, the authors say that you can use this tool to repair broken audio and video files, as well as reducing their sizes. You can also tweak picture files, flipping and rotating images. Ripping DVDs for backup or archival purposes is supported too.

The authors are working to make this tool available to as many folks as possible. It is currently available in over a dozen languages, but if you're fluent in one that they haven't localized for yet, they're eager for you to give them a hand with that as well.

Format Factory is a Windows application.

Download Format Factory